Sustainability

Creating advocacy together, our long-term commitment to you and the planet.

We care for the environment

We use natural resources rationally and take on all measures to prevent pollution.
Furthermore, we constantly strive to reduce the environmental impact of our operations and services.

Our sustainability goals

Our mission - working for a better world.

Our sustainability team and as a company in a whole we focus on 4 goals.

Our teams organize regular activities to support our goals such as participation in the World Clean-Up Day, recycling, sports activities ergonomic workplace, carpooling, etc.

Carbon footprint

As leaders in the logistics industry, we contribute to the development, well-being of society and the environment. We help customers increase efficiency, decrease emissions, offering several options for minimizing and/or avoiding logistics-related emissions.

Find out how - Carbon footprint

Enabling a healthy physical and mental life is the responsibility of both employer and employee. Putting the health and safety of our employees and customers first is at the core of our values.

We invest in quality education and sharing the skills we have developed across the globe will help us grow as individuals, as a professional organization, allowing us to provide cross-discipline solutions unique to Ahlers.

We want to enable our employees to have decent work where they can grow, contribute, and play an important part in determining the future of Ahlers.

We care about the environment so that we, as individuals and as a company, can have a bright future.

“Environmental support is an integral part of our company philosophy”.

Stay healthy initiatives such as our table tennis, and badminton contests help our employees make small lifestyle choices. We continuously strive to keep our staff motivated in the sports season with initiatives around football and running as well as create opportunities for healthy choices with our daily office fruit delivery. Our bike2work initiative is not only good for our health but also contributes to a better environment and fewer traffic jams.
Employee well-being program - we offer psychological support (hotline) through our health insurance program to support any mental health issues our employees might be experiencing.
Working from home -The flexibility for employees to work from home or remotely allows our people to remain agile, and productive whilst keeping a healthy work-life balance environment.
COVID and flu protection - we accelerated the COVID vaccine process for our employees in agreement with a local hospital. We also promote free-onsite flu vaccinations at several of our locations as well as on-site COVID testing possibilities.
Creating clear workplace guidelines for health and safety. The Ahlers environmental health and safety policy outlines the commitments we take as a company.

The Challenge — Health is a fundamental human right and a key indicator of sustainable development.

Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being at all ages for all of our employees is essential to sustainable development. The COVID-19 pandemic continues and growing mental health issues continue to impact our lives.

"Having good health is directly related to leading a productive life. This is a key part of our mission. Not only do we launch several “stay healthy” initiatives for our employees, but by ensuring safe operations, secured transport, and creating healthy environments for our employees, using clear policies and state-of-the-art systems, we support our customers in their journey to good health." Roger Chantillon, CEO, Ahlers Logistics

The induction program for our new hires offers quality education across our business support functions and commercial business units sharing best practices, to ensure the successful onboarding of our employees.
Lifelong learning opportunities and business-specific learning programs are offered to our employees, such as the Ahlers IT Security awareness campaign. Self-paced microlearning is offered and tracked in our HR e-learning platform. Collaborating with the industry sector, allows people to benefit from the latest industry-related training.
Managers Talks - Public sessions are organized on a regular basis where experts share their insights and key learnings.
Leaders teach Leaders - Leadership training for our warehousing first-line managers provided by the managers in specific professional areas and soft-skills development.

The Challenge — The industry is setting high demands on the education process, as logistics needs highly skilled resources. Not only specialists but also operational workers will be faced to work with new technologies. This will require continuous improvement of the educational processes and building the right skill sets; retaining the talent essential to growing the business. When somebody leaves, they walk away with a lot of knowledge and experience and new people need to be found and trained again.

Professional and personal development is a key prerequisite in motivating and retaining talented employees, vital to our business success, hence we relentlessly focus on developing performance and cost-effective, sustainable solutions supported by a permanent learning environment and state-of-the-art technologies.

Safety experts provide training in handling dangerous goods. They are trained in a dedicated training center, receive special certificates for loading and unloading operations, and require recurrent mandatory training every 3 years.
The Ahlers way describes the cornerstone of our values and promotes entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation throughout the organization. The company we are building is fueled by a growth mindset in an organization that respects the Ahlers’ traditional values.

"Our human resources department focuses on discovering and promoting the potential of every one of our employees by offering jobs that provide market conform salaries, ensuring safe working conditions, and safeguarding workers’ rights. This way, we foster innovation and create tailor-made sustainable solutions for the supply chain of the future."
Hilde Nuyts, Human Resources Director, Ahlers Logistics

The Сhallenge — Several significant supply chain disruptions have marked the past year, the pandemic continued to cause major disruptions. This has proven the importance of the logistics industry. However, for young potential, we still need to create more awareness, to showcase how appealing a career in logistics can be. At the same time, transferring skills, employee retention, creating opportunities for growth, and driving diversity are key.

“Our human resources department focuses on discovering and promoting the potential of every one of our employees by offering jobs that provide market conform salaries, ensuring safe working conditions, and safeguarding workers’ rights. This way, we foster innovation and create tailor-made sustainable solutions for the supply chain of the future."

Hilde Nuyts, Corporate HR Director

Going green for the future – Our sustainability team organizes numerous recycling activities of batteries, clothing, and plastics so we can help to protect our planet and give opportunities to people to volunteer and learn new skills.
Modal shift implementation - From truck to barge - calculations from working with one of our customers show that every container going over water instead of land saves up to 64,71kg CO2 emissions - approx. 50% reduction compared to road transport.
Moving goods by rail instead of the road to further reduce emissions - Optimizing daily transport routes by analyzing the impact of adapted delivery frequency on the required number of trucks and driven kilometers. Integration of trailer operations to deliver containers and short sea.
Implementing best practices in transportation to reduce carbon footprint: Increasing the use of origin consolidation. Utilizing new/amended routings to reduce the number of miles traveled.

The Сhallenge — Climate change is set to define the era that we live in for at least decades to come. Great strides are being made in climate action, but is it enough? Companies and investors have embraced the net-zero agenda as well, while customers increasingly expect the businesses they buy from to take sustainability issues into account. How can we contribute to thinking differently in order to really achieve the lasting and transformative change we need to see?

As transportation experts, we recognize the impact our industry has on the environment. Our priority is to help our customers on reducing carbon footprint and respond to the mounting environmental pressures. Environmental support is an integral part of our company philosophy and our sustainability team across the globe helps to support and drive numerous activities so that we as individuals and as a company can have a better greener future.

Emission friendly choices to meet all your transportation needs

As transportation experts, we recognize the impact our industry has on the environment.
Our priority is to help you focus on reducing carbon footprint, responding to the mounting environmental pressures.

Implementing modal shifts to enhance reduction of CO², changing transport modes to more environmentally friendly ones.
Finding sustainable solutions helping to decrease growing traffic jams and guarantee transport lead-times.

Transportation visualization transparency, assessing carbon footprint impacts, with easy access to smart dashboards and comprehensive KPIs developed by our Data Analytics expert services.

Saving the planet – How we all contribute at Ahlers

Paper containers for recycling

Our Responsible Consumption and Production team organized the collection of paper for recycling. The Technical Service collects paper from the containers on a bi-weekly basis. Collecting waste paper is not only environmentally friendly but also beneficial. Paper and cardboard are not only removed from our warehouses, but our office staff can now also contributes.

Recycling old clothing

Each year we collect several containers of old clothing – some of it will be sold to support charity and some recycled to become new cloth. In our Saint Petersburg location, we have moved the containers for collecting clothing into our auditorium, to raise awareness for people to help the cause.

Reduce consumption of plastic

To reduce the consumption of plastics we stopped purchasing bottled water in our offices. We have drinking water from purifiers, located in all buildings, using the ceramic mugs provided to our workforce. All purifiers have 4 filters inside, to purify the water from bacteria and viruses.

Battery collection

In several of our locations, we collect batteries during the year to send them off for recycling. Every employee can put their used batteries into special containers. When batteries are processed the following fractions will have a new life and can be used again: metal scrap, copper powder, manganese dioxide, and zinc dust.

Clean up week

Every year, we support the annual world clean-up campaign. In all of our countries, we take time to clean our cities of any dirt which begins with individual action for collective clean communities. The aim is not only to have cleaner cities, parks, beaches, and forests, but to also move towards better waste management, and raise awareness both locally and globally of the global waste problem.

Plastic Free Month

With the Ahlers sustainability team, we participate and pledge to reduce plastic waste. Our team participated in the May Plastic Free initiative for Flanders, Belgium; so we can have cleaner streets, oceans, and beautiful communities. With the Ahlers sustainability team, we participate and pledge to reduce plastic waste. We already gave all employees a drinking bottle, and we have a program for street volunteers who regularly pick up plastic waste from the streets.